171–180 of 533 posts
For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…
For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…
I do, it's called vendor lock-in. The product they're trying to sell is not the $200 subscription, it's the entire Claude Code ecosystem.
For the average person, the words "AI" and "ChatGPT" are synonims. OpenAI's competitors have long conceded this loss, and for the most part, they're not even trying to compete, because it's clear to everyone that there is no clear path to monetization in this market - the average joe isn't going to pay for a $100/mo subscription to ask a chatbot to do their homework or write a chocolate cake recipe, so good luck making money there.
The programming market is an entirely different story, though. It's clear that corporations are willing to pay decent money to replace human programmers with a service that does their work in a fraction of the time (and even the programmers themselves are willing to pay independently to do less work, even if it will ultimately make them obsolete), and they don't care enough about quality for that to be an issue. So everyone is currently racing to capture this potentially profitable market, and Claude Code is Anthropic's take on this.
Simply selling the subscription on its own without any lock-in isn't the goal, because it's clearly not profitable, nor is it currently meant to be, it's a loss leader. The actual goal is to get people invested long-term in the Claude Code ecosystem as a whole, so that when the financial reality catches up to the hype and prices have to go up 5x to start making real money, those people feel compelled to keep paying, instead of seeking out cheaper alternatives, or simply giving up on the whole idea. This is why using the subscription as an API for other apps isn't allowed, why Claude Code is closed source, why it doesn't support third party OpenAI-compatible APIs, and why it reads a file called CLAUDE.md instead of something more generic.
For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. Because they are harvesting all the data they can harvest through CLI to train further models. API access in contrast provides much more limited data
As far as I know, OpenCode sends (has to send) the same data to Anthropic as Claude Code™ CLI (especially if they're going to successfully imitate CC™ in order to access cheap subscription pricing).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscription, not the open-source OpenCode CLI. Because they are harvesting all the data they can harvest through CLI to train further models. API access in contrast provides much more limited data
Claude Code only trains on data if you opt in
Similar to a gym membership where only a small part of the paying users actually show up.
For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…
What's ridiculous is that the subscription at 180€/month (excl. VAT) is already absurdly expensive for what you get. I doubt many would sign up for the per-API usage as it's just not sustainable pricing (as a user).
For folks not following the drama: Anthropic's $200/month subscription for Claude Code is much cheaper than Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API. In a month of Claude Code, it's easy to use so many LLM tokens that it would have cost you more than $1,000 if you'd paid via the API. Why is Anthropic offering such favorable pricing to subscribers? I dunno. But they really want you to use the Claude Code™ CLI with that subscript…
What's ridiculous is that the subscription at 180€/month (excl. VAT) is already absurdly expensive for what you get. I doubt many would sign up for the per-API usage as it's just not sustainable pricing (as a user).
I'm very surprised that it took them this long to crack down on it. It's been against the terms of service from the start. When I asked them back in March last year whether individuals can use the higher rate limits that come with the Claude Code subscription in other applications, that was also a no.
Question is: what changed? New founding round coming up, end of fiscal year, planning for IPO? Do they have to cut losses?
Because the other surprise here is that apparently most people don't know the true cost of tokens and how much money Anthropic is losing with power users of Claude Code.